Darrington: Mining Town/Timber Town

The cast of characters in Elizabeth Poehlman’s book, Darrington: Mining Town/Timber Town reads like a Wild West novel set in Paul Bunyan country. But this is no novel - Poehlman has written a memorable small-town history. The book starts in the late 1800s with the struggles of Chief Wawetkin and the Sauk-Suiattle Indians to deal with the onset of miners and settlers throughout their homelands deep in what would soon be renamed the North Cascades mountains in the new state of Washington. Subsequent chapters feature gold-fevered miners (and a revenge murder); a hotel owner who asked to be deputized for a half hour to deal with a knife-wielding drunk the sheriff couldn’t handle; the town doctor who kept a bear cub as a pet; the sky pilot minister who was too scared to preach in the rough railroad logging camps, opting to show slides instead; the Tarheels who followed the timber industry from North Carolina and brought their love of bluegrass and moonshine; the Depression-era housewife who distrusted banks and stashed her family’s savings around her waist in a hidden money belt - enough to almost pay off their land and house. Darrington, as Poehlman learned while living there, may be backwoods, but never boring.